Carty: Rodriguez has forged ahead. Now will he strike it big?

Tony Ding | APRich Rodriguez refused to play it safe. Instead, like settlers before him, he's chasing the great American dream.

He's 57 now, but Richard can still remember the day Bo Schembechler was hired as the new University of Michigan football coach.

He was in high school, heard the news on the radio and had no idea who Schembechler was.

The following fall, he enrolled at Michigan as a freshman. He saw the historic 1969 upset of Ohio State in person and has lived and died with the team since.

This week he called from California to let me know he's nervous about today's season opener against the University of Utah, the debut of new coach Rich Rodriguez and the most complete offensive overhaul since ... well ... probably since ever.

How nervous?

As nervous as he's ever been in those 38 seasons since 1969, Richard said.
But the funny thing was, he sounded happy.

It's a strange situation. Since 1969, Michigan has been one of the most successful college football programs in America. There hasn't been a losing season.

The guy Rodriguez is replacing, Lloyd Carr, won the school's first national championship since Harry S. Truman was president and, in his final season, finished 9-4 and ranked in the Top 25.

And without getting into the whole bumpy road, let's just say Rodriguez's first months here were filled with more off-field drama than all of Carr's 27 seasons at Michigan combined.

Yet most folks, like Richard, are fired up.

Fired up even though this team has a totally unproven quarterback (no matter who starts, although it'll be a surprise if it's not former walk-on Nick Sheridan), an offensive line that's almost equally inexperienced and, oh yeah, that new offensive system, which happens to be among the most complicated in college football.

Fired up even though Utah could very well win today.

On the face of things, this doesn't make much sense.

Only it does, both for Michigan fans and in a greater sense.

Yeah, a bird in the hand is worth two in the bush ... but the fact is, those two birds sure are tempting. And just settling for that one bird seems like ... well, settling.
It's un-American, really.

What if in the early 1800s, everybody had just kicked it and decided, "Hey, you know what? We've got it pretty good. Why would we ever want to move West?"

We're a nation of manifest destiny. A people whose ancestors were willing to pass up the bird in the hand and strike out for something better - for the chance at the biggest of dreams - whether they did so immigrating here from another country, riding in a wagon train West, or coming to Detroit and Ypsilanti from the Deep South for a steady job.

That's what this is, in a football sense, a shot at the bigger dream.

Michigan was very good under Carr, sometimes great. But at the end, there was a sense that something was missing, of potential being squandered. Carr was much, much more interested in protecting the bird in the hand at all costs than shooting for something more.

Rodriguez never had a bird in the hand.

He started out in the lowest level of coaching - at a place where he did the laundry and the football program folded after one season.

And not having a bird, he had to take risks. Along the way, he invented a big part of the spread offense.

He's always going to go for those two birds in the bush, because he doesn't know any better.

That will probably work here, but it might not work this season.

Remember those folks on the wagon train?

Well, there's no easy way to put this ... some of them, you know, didn't make it.

Especially the first ones.

On some level, that's why Richard - and a lot of other folks - are nervous.
Today we'll start to get some idea of just how hard the journey's going to be.

Read more from Jim Carty at blog.mlive.com/jim_carty. He can be reached at 734-994-6815 or jcarty@annarbornews.com.